Christine Flowers: A liberal dose of another world view

Growing up, I never much thought of myself in terms of being liberal or conservative. I was too busy trying to figure out how to get a guy from St. Joe’s Prep (any guy, any class) to notice me, which was a futile endeavor and made for some really bad poetry which I then put to music. Since I only knew four chords, most of the songs that I wrote sounded suspiciously similar to “House of the Rising Sun,” except with lyrics like this:

“I never saw the sea/I never saw a bird flying free, o’er the sea/Never me

Still, I can smell its sand/Still, I can feel the waves reaching out, toward the sand/Desert hand”

I’ll spare you the other five verses. So you can see that my identity as a political and philosophical conservative did not form in my early, Joan Baez years. It really became solidified when I went to Bryn Mawr College.

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It was at Bryn Mawr that I first realized I had lived a sheltered life, where everyone I knew opposed abortion rights and went to Mass on Sunday. Here was a school where some women prayed to a pagan goddess and danced around a large phallic symbol in the middle of campus for weekend recreation.

Neither Toto nor Christine were in Kansas anymore.

And the more time I spent on campus, the more things I learned about people who didn’t share my more conventional beliefs about marriage, morality, religion, feminism and life in general. It was eye-opening in a good way, and it reinforced my conservative convictions. It also gave me an opportunity to see from the inside how my philosophical polar opposites viewed the world.

Then I graduated, and went to a law school that was much more like my sheltered high school than Bryn Mawr and I fell back into my comfortable cocoon of conservatism. I wasn’t forced to stretch my value muscles to the breaking point, and almost forgot that there was a whole other universe out there where women talked about the patriarchy and their boyfriends hated Ronald Reagan and Oliver North.

(Brief aside: I so adored Col. North that during the Iran-Contra hearings I renamed our family’s guinea pigs from Frida and Pablo to Ollie and Fawn.)

And for a very long time thereafter, even as I practiced immigration law and came in contact with people of a more progressive ilk, I didn’t trouble myself too much with how the other side lived. Then, I had the good fortune to become a columnist, and my email address went public.

Recently, I was engulfed in a liberal tsunami when one enterprising progressive decided to sign me up for a whole slew of promotions, memberships and newsletters. I know it was done to both punish and annoy me, but it actually had the opposite effect. Having been insulated for such a long time from the left wing fringes of society, it was exhilarating to have a glimpse of what passed for liberal groupthink.

There was the link to Sigrid’s “Lesbian Romantic” podcast, informing me that I could sign up for regular episodes if I just “clicked here.” It also promised I could “check out the extra scenes,” which gave me an LSD like flashback to a particularly troubling incident involving a loofah and very thin bathroom walls circa 1980, Merion Dorm.

There was the succession of emails welcoming me to NARAL Pro Choice America from one Ilyse G. Hogue, who poignantly sounded the alarm about how Donald Trump was a “clear and present danger to America.”

There was the exact same language used in the “Welcome Christine!” email from Planned Parenthood.

There were the emails from pro-pot organizations, thanking me for believing in everyone’s right to smoke their brains out and asking me for money and Doritos.

There was the subscription to American Atheists magazine, the Africa Liberal Network, the LGBT Center of Central PA, High Times Magazine, “Ganjapreneur.com,” CNN’s Morning Briefing, the La Leche League, Emily’s List, and even one from Chelsea Clinton, who wrote “stop writing about my mother.” (Okay, it didn’t say that but I know that’s what it would have said if it wasn’t produced by a bot.)

My favorite email came from the Satanic Temple, which proudly informed me that I had joined just in time to enjoy the new “Satanic Veteran’s Memorial” which was being planned in Belle Plaine, Minn. Who says satanic progressives are “anti-military?”

While I chuckle a bit at the ingenuity of my left-wing readers and their interesting sense of humor, there is a serious element to this exercise. The people who sent me these emails are all self-professed progressives, people who wore pink hats and compared Trump to Hitler. It is good for me to be reminded of the mindset of those who oppose most of the things which I hold dear.

These aren’t your grandmother’s lefties.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and Delaware County resident. Her column appears every Sunday. Email her at cflowers1961@gmail.com.